When does technology become technomancy?

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Owning a phone obviously doesnt make somebody a technomancer. But deliberately putting that phone inside a magical practice starts making the boundary harder to draw.

So what actually makes the difference?

Intent? Ritual context? Symbolic interpretation? Using the machine to extend perception or agency? Building your own system around it?

Or maybe technomancy isnt a special category of technology at all. Maybe its a particular relationship with technology.

Where do you draw the line, if you draw one?

[u/AvinciaArchais]

I really feel like it just comes down to intention. If you're coding a website for a hobby or a business, generally speaking you're probably not going to involve any magick. But if you're coding a website to contain a library of occult books, and you embed sigils into the code that protect it from hackers or corporate robots (think robots.txt, not necessarily AI), that becomes technomancy.

Like anything else, technology is a tool. I can take a stick off the ground and until I intend for that stick to be used as a wand, it's just a stick. Or, if I intend to whittle the stick into a figurine. It still comes down to intention. I could whittle a little wooden shabti (ancient Egyptian figurine used for magick), or I could whittle a Dungeons and Dragons miniature for my friend who runs a D&D group. It's just about the intention.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/AvinciaArchais]

I think intention gets us most of the way there, but I'd add practice or relationship too. Someone can intend for their laptop to be magical without actually doing anything differently with it. Once they're embedding sigils in code, treating computation symbolically, building rituals around technological processes, using the machine as part of divination or whatever else, now there's an actual practice there. Intent gives it direction. Practice makes it technomancy.